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Hermippus says, that he met with certain memoirs without any author's name, in which it was written that Demosthenes was a scholar to Plato, and learnt much of his eloquence from him; and he also mentions Ctesibius, as reporting from Callias of Syracuse and some others, that Demosthenes secretly obtained a knowledge of the systems of Isocrates and Alcidamas, and mastered them thoroughly.
But who was possessed of a more ample fund of erudition? who more subtle and acute? or who furnished with quicker powers of invention, and a greater strength of understanding, than Aristotle? I may add, who made a warmer opposition to the rising fame of Isocrates? And yet he, though he forbids us to versify in prose, recommends the use of numbers.
That hour was but the essential agony of a soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the Athens of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion.
By teaching this to the most celebrated Speakers, and Composers of the age, his house came at last to be honoured as the School of Eloquence. Wherefore as I bore the censure of others with indifference, when I had the good fortune to be applauded by Cato; thus Isocrates, with the approbation of Plato, may slight the judgment of inferior critics.
For, as you know, Socrates is introduced in almost the last page of the Phaedrus speaking in these words: "At present, O Phaedrus, Isocrates is quite a young man; but still I delight in telling the expectations which I have of him." "What are they?" says he.
Isocrates the rhetorician, when at a drinking bout some begged him to make a speech, only returned: With those things in which I have skill the time doth not suit; and in those things with which the time suits I have no skill.
Even in the extremely diluted form of the Eleusinian Mysteries, their value is most highly praised by the most eminent men of Greece, as Pindar, Sophocles, Isocrates, Plutarch, and Plato. Especially were they regarded as useful with regard to post-mortem existence, as the Initiated learned that which ensured his future happiness.
But the air of amused compassion with which the lusty Down-Easter, who had made me feel what the digito monstrari was, now looked down on me, raised a feeling of resentment and self-depreciation which left me in no mood to make a brilliant show of scholarship in construing my "Isocrates" that morning.
Similarly, to Plato and to Isocrates, to Aristotle and to Aeschines, if peace is to be extended to all the earth "like a river," Hellas is the fountain from which it must flow. It is an imperial peace bounded by Hellenic civilization, culture, laws. It is a peace forged upon war. Rome with her genius for actuality discovers this.
They celebrate two ancient heroic deeds of Athens, on which the panegyrists, amongst the rest Isocrates, who always mixed up the fabulous with the historical, lay astonishing stress: the protection they are said to have afforded to the children of Hercules, the ancestors of the Lacedaemonian kings, from the persecution of Eurystheus, and their going to war with Thebes on behalf of Adrastus, king of Argos, and forcing the Thebans to give the rites of burial to the Seven Chieftains and their host.
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